Viral diseases most definitely can be cured with current research techniques. If anything, they present a much easier target than cancer or other end-of-life d

Viral diseases most definitely can be cured with current research techniques. If anything, they present a much easier target than cancer or other end-of-life diseases, because viruses are comparatively simple little infectious agents and comprise the sole cause of the disease, so a cure only needs to attack one thing. Their genome is on the order of a few thousand base pairs, usually only 10-100 genes. You should check out all the new antiviral drugs that have been developed over the last decade, it is really the product of the new age of genome-level research. [1] The main problem in developing antiviral drugs is toxicity, because viruses co-opt certain parts of the cell and have proteins that are usually similar to normal human genes, and you have to find treatments that only target the viral activity. For example, the first commercially successful antiviral [2] targets reverse transcriptase, which performs a function that normal human cells never do (transcribe RNA -> DNA). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acyclovir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acyclovir